Maggie Lockridge Saugus resident Maggie Lockridge received a phone call in late 2008 from the producer of Dr. Phil McGraw’s former television program, asking if she might be able to help a military veteran in great need.  A few weeks later, Lockridge and a Beverly Hills ophthalmic surgeon were in the audience of the “Dr. Phil” show when McGraw brought out a young veteran named Randy Gollinger who’d lost a leg and an eye while serving overseas.  “He had refused to come out of his bedroom,” Lockridge said of the young veteran during a recent telephone interview. “He wouldn’t even come out for meals. Well, his sister wrote to Dr. Phil, asking if there was any way he could help him (her brother) with his eye.”  According to Lockridge, the military didn’t give Gollinger an ocular implant, a device surgically placed in the eye socket that moves in conjunction with the working eye. Instead, he got a glass eye that remained in a fixed position.  Without getting into too many details, Lockridge said Gollinger was horrified with his looks. He agreed to go on “Dr. Phil” to share his story.  “I looked at myself,” Gollinger said on the show, “and I didn’t even really want to be alive.”   McGraw introduced Gollinger to Lockridge and her surgeon, who were sitting in the audience. Lockridge then explained what they were going to do.   The veteran and his mother were brought to tears. Lockridge, her ophthalmic surgeon and their team would fix Gollinger’s eye. His mother later shared with Lockridge what it all meant to her and her son.  “She was all teary eyed,” Lockridge said, “and she said to me, ‘Maggie, I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t worry about my son committing suicide anymore.’”  Lockridge, 83, is the founder and president of RAW (Rebuilding America’s Warriors), which is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to providing reconstructive surgery to wounded and disfigured veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.   RAW founder Maggie Lockridge reminisces as she points out photos with notable individuals earlier this month at her home office in Saugus. Katherine Quezada/The Signal. Katherine Quezada/The Signal According to RAW promotional materials, the foundation’s services are available to all branches of the military and are free to wounded vets. RAW picks up where the military leaves off, the materials read, providing procedures that the military does not offer or cover.  Lockridge founded RAW in 2007 after seeing a television documentary about the Iraq invasion. The documentary took viewers into Veterans Affairs hospitals, showing traumatically brain-injured soldiers who also had residual facial disfigurements.   Around the time Lockridge saw this documentary, she’d also been following the news about the difficulty the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., was having in trying to meet the heavy influx of the wounded. Lockridge knew what she had to do, and she had the skills and the background to do it.  Born and raised on a farm in Vermont, the RAW founder said she had two wonderful parents and a fairytale childhood with horses. She harbored a goal to either be a nurse or an actress.  “It was kind of frowned upon to run away to Hollywood,” she said. “So, I went to nurses training in Boston. Upon graduation, I always wanted to live in New York City, so I moved to New York. Within a week, I was on ‘The Price is Right,’ and I was the winner. I got to go back the next day and win some more.”  Shortly after that, Lockridge secured a job in the operating room of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She was there for a year when the 1964-65 World’s Fair came to Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.   There, she worked as a nurse for the summer at the General Motors “Futurama” pavilion, which, she said, was the busiest exhibit at the fair with anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 people in line for hours at a time, requiring two nurses regularly to deal with health and safety issues they came across in the large crowds. Lockridge dealt with people passing out in the heat, their scrapes and bruises, and she even helped deliver a baby.  It was at the GM pavilion that she met and fell “madly in love” with a GM junior executive who’d been checking in on the exhibit. He’d later ask her to marry him, but three days after that, he broke it off because, Lockridge said, his parents had a terrible marriage, and he got too scared.   “He broke my heart,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, if I can’t have the man of my dreams, I’ll have my career.’ I joined the Air Force.”  Lockridge thought she could be a member of the Aeromedical Evacuation nurse specialty unit, who’d fly the wounded home from Vietnam. However, she met and married a fighter pilot, got pregnant, and in her seventh month, was sent home to become a mother.  She’d have two children, raising them in Hawaii, before her marriage ended after 14 years. As a result, she and the kids moved back to her home state of Vermont. When her youngest child — her daughter — graduated high school, the two of them moved to California.  “She (Lockridge’s daughter) had done modeling and acting,” Lockridge said. “She said, ‘Mom, I’d really like to go out there.’ I wasn’t tied down in Vermont, and so I said, ‘OK, honey,’ and she and I came out to Beverly Hills.”  One day, Lockridge was reading a newspaper and came across an article about L’ermitage Beverly Hills Hotel and how it was a hidden spot that celebrities used to recover from surgical procedures. She wanted to be a part of that. While she hadn’t been in nursing for years, she thought that if she went back to that kind of work, she wouldn’t want to do it in a traditional hospital setting. Working in the plastic surgery business, however, would be much better.  Lockridge applied, got a job as a charge nurse, and she came to love it.  In 1996, she opened Chantique, which later became Shanteque, a luxury cosmetic surgery recovery retreat in Beverly Hills, where she, over the course of her career there, supervised the care of over 40,000 recuperating guests. She did that until 2005.   In 2007, when she started RAW, she’d expected 20,000 wounded warriors from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 40,000, she said, came back.  RAW pamphlets and awards sit in Maggie Lockridge’s home office earlier this month. Katherine Quezada/The Signal Over the years, Lockridge has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and attracted over 400 surgeons and dentists all over the country to donate their services to help wounded veterans. Her organization has assisted in repairing veterans’ scars, damaged ears and other body parts. She’s also helped vets with rotting teeth. She said she believes the teeth problems were the result of mandatory anthrax vaccinations that those in the military going overseas had to receive before heading out.  “In 2012, a young man sent me a picture of his teeth,” Lockridge said. “It looked like meth mouth. I called him and learned he’s a husband and takes in foster children, he’s got a couple of his own, he lives in Texas, he’s religious. I thought, ‘What’s going on here? I don’t think he’s on drugs.’”  After doing some research, Lockridge said she felt that the vaccinations these vets received were contaminated, causing hundreds of deaths and the suffering of thousands of others. One of the reactions, she said, was dental decay and teeth loss, a problem she believed began to show up 12 to 18 months after vets received the shots.  And so, in 2012, that’s when RAW began offering dental treatment to veterans.   “We’ve had probably about 150 guys that we’ve given total dental restoration to,” Lockridge said. “They don’t have any idea what’s happening to their mouth. They don’t relate it to the military.”  One Army veteran, Douglas Duvall, who received help from RAW, wrote a letter to the organization in May 2017, thanking them for fixing his teeth. He sent before-and-after pictures to show off the night-and-day difference.  Maggie Lockridge looks through dozens of veterans thank-you letters earlier this month at her home office in Saugus. Katherine Quezada/The Signal “I’ll be honest with you,” Duvall wrote, “I’m still trying to get used to actually smiling instead of keeping my lips over my teeth. We had a family gathering about a week after I had all the dental work done, and we were taking pictures while we were out altogether, and I remember my sister-in-law telling me to smile. I guess I have just been so used to hiding it that I didn’t realize I wasn’t even smiling, but as soon as she mentioned it, I had a big cheek-to-cheek smile showing my teeth off.”  Lockridge said she feels fulfilled when she can help veterans — not just because she’s a veteran herself, but also because she’s a nurse.  “You just take great joy out of either helping somebody live in a hospital situation or helping them be able to have a better quality of life,” she said. “I used to say I think they’re my sons until my daughter reminded me that they’re more like my grandsons. I’d say, ‘You had to spoil it, didn’t you, kiddo?’”  For more information about RAW, go to RebuildingAmericasWarriors.org or call 310-245-6775.  Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].  Portrait of RAW founder Maggie Lockridge. Katherine Quezada/The Signal The post Faces of the SCV: She’s rebuilding America’s warriors one wound at a time  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.